“Gates of Empire” is not the broad slapstick comedy of the Breckinridge Elkins stories. Giles is just this side of realism, and while a comic figure, is one who is constantly in danger. Not so Elkins, who will never be harmed. Throughout “Gates of Empire” Howard reveals a fine sense of comic timing and understatement. The pacing is brilliant. Guiscard de Chastillon always manages to arrive at just the worst, and most entertaining, moment. Sometimes the humor in the piece arises from characters having what would be a perfectly reasonable conversation if it were not completely based upon lies that Giles has told them about his own condition. A rogue, Giles is mostly harmless, and likable, clever enough to stay just ahead of any situation he’s created for himself. Indeed, almost everything that befalls Giles comes of his own poor choices. His cleverness allows him to make lemonade every time he falls into a vat of lemons, but in climbing out of one barrel he nearly always manages to make another poor choice that leads him into another.
Following Giles is nothing like following Conan, who is usually one step ahead of the readers. With Giles, Howard lets us in on the joke. We’re the superior to Giles in many ways, although few of us would be likely to lie so convincingly when the chips are down. As readers we know far better than Giles that the lovely girl leading him on through the darkness cannot possibly intend anything good for him; we have a greater understanding than Giles of exactly what he is up against in scene after scene and it creates a different kind of tension than Howard is famous for. Conan will surely get out of the scene via his prowess and intelligence, but how will Giles manage to avoid destruction this time? Dumb luck? More clever improvization? “Gates of Empire” is one of those stories that only improves upon revisiting.
Sadly, although it would have been nice to know what Howard thought of the story, or his progress as a writer, no surviving letter discusses either Giles or “Gates of Empire,” and he was never to write another piece quite like it.
A FINAL FLURRY
“The Road of the Eagles” returned Howard to the driven men and the darker tone more typical of him, but he strove even further this time, presenting us with a host of characters, all at odds, each so compelling that we cannot help but root for all of them, even though we know that for any one of them to triumph the others will fail and almost surely die. In the first pages it may seem at first that Ivan’s mission of vengeance will be the story’s central focus, but before long we meet Osman Pasha, and after some time in his company his agile mind and capable arm win our admiration. On the run, he has no options left him until the girl Ayesha begs him for aid in freeing a prince who will surely grant a kingdom to him and his followers. The chief conflict falls between Ivan’s chase of Osman and Osman’s pursuit of his dream, but there is also the matter of Ayesha, who’s fallen in love with the Turkish prince and uses all the wiles and charms at her command to win his freedom. She is merciless but determined, and we cannot help but root for her success. Howard even allows us a glimpse of the prince’s potential, hashish-addled though he is: “But there were strong lines in his keen face, not yet erased by sloth and dissipation, and under the rich robe his limbs were cleancut and hard.” Even so minor a character as Kral, who desires to aid the Kazaks and avenge himself upon the Turkomans, is brought to life, and death.
Death awaits nearly everyone over the course of the story, Howard sending each of them neatly on their way to their ends with the precision of an accomplished tragedian. The only moment within the piece that really falters is the conclusion, where Ivan and Osman discover that they are old friends, far from home. After so many fine scenes, from the irony of the prince’s death moments before men arrive to liberate him to our final glimpse of Kral, this last one feels less like the concluding moment and more like one hammerstroke too many on the bell of futility. In Howard’s defense, though, it is hard to imagine the story ending happily for either character, and this conclusion, at least, is a surprise.
Almost incidentally, we see a final Lamb influence within this tale, for the speech of Ivan and his friends – sometimes the very cadence and rhythm of their words – is reminiscent of the talk and behavior of Ayub and Demid. By this point, though, Howard is not writing pastiche. He is like a fine musician who has listened well to the playing of a piece and can effortlessly weave part of that theme into his own work.
In “The Road of the Eagles” Howard experimented with the rising and falling of fates of a whole host of characters and managed to make us care about all of them, despite the fact that none of them were explicitly good, or bad – although it might be conceded that “Ivan” is the least black-hearted among them, for all that he is a slayer like the others. “Hawks Over Egypt” is a return in some ways to the focus of Howard’s earlier historicals, although the twists and turns of the plot and its focus on a single span of days rather than a course of years is different from the epic sprawl of his four master tales (beginning with “The Sowers of the Thunder” and ending with “The Shadow of the Vulture”). Each of those four deals with the fall of cities and the death of kings – usually from their own hubris – the disintegration of empires or the dreams of those empires. Once Howard reaches “Gates of Empire” the events within take place over no more than a span of months. “The Shadow of the Vulture” might be said to look back toward its three predecessors and forward – with its greater focus upon character and telescoped narrative – toward the next. But then there are seldom clear boundary lines in any discussion of fiction, be it genre definition or periods and phases of an author’s work.
It must be noted, too, that these last three complete historicals – “The Road of the Eagles,” “Hawks Over Egypt,” and “The Road of Azrael” – did not see print within Howard’s lifetime. Likely that was because, in the depths of the depression, Oriental Stories did not generate enough income to survive, even with a name change to Magic Carpet. Howard had created a backlog of stories that didn’t see print, despite the efforts of Otis A. Kline, his agent. He was to write nothing more in a similar vein, and once claimed that writing the historicals took far too much time. One wonders, though, if Howard might have plunged forward into a genre for which he clearly had a natural talent had there been more markets. Could he have been putting the best face on a bad situation when his historical markets dried up? Clearly he loved the study of history and found rich inspiration for stories whenever he read of it. A letter to H. P. Lovecraft in April of 1932 bears witness:
I read with much interest and appreciation your speculations on the possible trend of history, in the event of the destruction of Rome by the Gauls; they seem to have considered all possible angles. Continuing with these theoretical wanderings: suppose that Martel had not stopped the Arabs at Tours? Or that Tamerlane or Genghis Khan had conquered Europe? Or, speculating from the other way, suppose that Alexander the Great had conquered India, and pressing on, subjugated the Cathayan empire? Would the East have been Aryanized, or the Western races sunk that much quicker in a mire of Orientalism? And suppose the Black Prince had carried out his dream of Oriental conquest? He was probably the only Western general of medieval times capable of holding his own with the great Eastern conquerors. In fact, I am convinced that, with his English archers, he would have proven more than a match for Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Baibars, Subotai, Saladin, or any of the rest. The main reason that the Crusaders and other western armies were so repeatedly defeated and overthrown by the Moslems and Mongols was partly because of the extreme mobility of the Oriental armies, partly because of the incredible inefficiency of the western kings and generals. In this exchange we can see a brief glimpse of viewpoints that are likely to strike modern readers as politically incorrect, but we cannot castigate a man for being a part of his own time rather than ours. Howard’s views on race were hardly unique to him; what were then considered scientific discussions of race were all the vogue in Howard’s day, and before the rise of the Nazis, discussion of the Aryan race as superior did not have the same sinister connotations that we experience today at the mere mention of the concept. Howard’s own views on race seem almost to have more of a “home-town” pride feel to them than anything else; in that same letter to Lovecraft, Howard writes: “I’ll swear, I’ve written of Christian armies being defeated by Moslems until my blood fairly seethes with rage. Some day I must write of the success of the earlier Crusades to gratify my racial vanity.”